Will Smith Says Having ‘Emancipation’ Movie “In My Life Is Poetic Perfection” – Hollywood Premiere

01.12.2022 - 08:03 / deadline.com

Apple Original Films finally unveiled the Will Smith movie Emancipation tonight at The Regency Village Theatre in Westwood.

The pic, in which Smith plays a runaway slave who embarks on a death-defying 10-day journey to escape his captors through swamps to a safe haven with the Union army, has long been buzzed about. It’s a role that will rival the actor’s Oscar-winning turn this past year as Venus and Serena Williams’ coach/father, Richard Williams, in King Richard.

While Smith’s scandal with Chris Rock at the Oscars put the pic’s release in question earlier this year, a well-received early NAACP-hosted screening in DC paved the way for Emancipation to find its way into a Q4 release in theaters this Friday and on AppleTV+ on Dec. 9.

Talking about how cathartic it is for the Antoine Fuqua-directed movie to finally be unveiled in the wake of a roller coaster year, Smith told Deadline, “When I took this film, I envisioned the potential service it could be to the modern social conversation.

“I thought it would be a necessary reminder of some of the roads we’ve been down as a country in the past to potentially avert those similar paths,” the actor added.

“To have a movie like this, in this time for me, and even this time in my life, is poetic perfection,” he beamed tonight on the red carpet.

In a GQ interview back in September 2021, Smith said, “I’ve always avoided making films about slavery…In the early part of my career … I didn’t want to show black people in that light.”

What made Emancipation different? The pic’s jumping-off point, as Deadline first told you when we reported on the project, was an indelible photo of a slave named Peter, whose back was scarred from whipping. The photo first appeared in The